Political Economy as a Paradigm for the Study of Islamic History

Peter Gran

International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 11, No. 4. (Jul., 1980), pp. 511-526.

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Int. J. Middle East Stud. 11 (198o), 511-526 Printed in the United States of America

Peter Gran

POLITICAL ECONOMY AS A PARADIGM

FOR THE STUDY OF ISLAMIC HISTORY

Two frameworks of interpretation of history and society have long struggled

with each other in the West and in the Islamic world: one is the modernization
theory of the American type, aligned at times with the older orientalism, the
other is some form of political economy. In the 197os, the theory of political
economy made a belated arrival in American intellectual life and still has
scarcely the prestige it has in France, Germany, Italy , or the Islamic countries.
The rising popularity of political economy especially among historians owes
much to the internal crisis of history in twentieth-century America. For the past
fifty years history has been borrowing its important new ideas and concepts
from other fields. The opposite was the case in the nineteenth century during
the formative period of the discipline. For most scholars, now , his tory provides
the background that precedes the point where their more scientific work com-
mences. Historians are seen by sympathetic and influential writers like the an-
thropologist Levi-Strauss as performing a useful function in organizing knowl-
edge chronologically, but it is not certain that this differs from what other fields
do, thereby justifying history as an independent discipline. The claim of histori-
ans to a special concern with the unique fact as distinct from scholars in the
social sciences and humanities seems na·ive to many since the historian intro-
duces himself into his work. According to his disposition and who he is, he con-
stitutes certain experiences as facts and not others, connects them in certain
ways and not others, and valorizes some above others. The claim that one is
working with a given, a fact out there, is believed by many to hark back to the
objective knowledge of the nineteenth century now in much disrepute. Orien-
talis ts have long been among the strongest advocates of these views, despite
the s hift to pragmatism by a few figures like Gustave von Grunebaum. The liter-
ary critic Hayden White has gone further , accusing his torians of moral obtuse-
ness because after World Wars I and II which devastated European civiliza-
tion, they were conspicuous mainly in the defense of their own countries. 1 In
effect, they were propagandists. The more horrible the events, the more s hal-
low the claim that they occurred as a result of what came before.
There are numerous variations within modernization and political economy
traditions, but the differences between them in epistemology and metaphysics
are fund amental. In presenting conflicting traditions, it is necessary to s tand
back from the contents of individual works and even to add a statement or two
where one or both traditions have not produced anything on certain subjects,

© 11)80 Cambridge University Press 0020-7438/80/040511-16 $01 .50

512 Peter Gran
so that the reader can follow the line of logic. It is important to note, however,
that the modernization theory and the older orientalism and political economy
have focused, often sharply, on certain time periods and subjects.
Stated simply, the modernization theory claims that most of the societies in
the world or regions called new states have no internal dynamic capable of pro-
ducing significant change. Important modernizing change requires "the coming
of the West .·· Modernization takes place through fruitful interaction between
reform-minded members of the local ruling elite and the West. In examining
more closely this theory and the way in which social scientists studying modem
society have applied it to the Islamic world , we find that the development of the
West, particularly industrial England, France, and the United States, is held to
be the universal model for how modernization is supposed to take place. By the
criterion adopted, most of Europe (Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Southern Eu-
rope, Scandinavia) and even large parts of the United States (especially the
South) are part of the underdeveloped world. T hree countries in the world , or
parts thereof, are differentiated from the rest as not backward. In addition to
the often discussed problems of precise location, or meaning, of modernity,
there is the premise that meaningful historical change only takes place in a
given country as the result of the actions of a small group of people called the
elite. Social historians as well as the whole political economy tradition have
had a difficult time dealing with this assumption. If the political elite were made
to be the causal agents, political economists and social historians would have a
hard time explaining the French Revolution , the English Civil War, the rise of
the Labor Party , or, analogously, large and consequential events in Islamic his-
tory from its inception through the revolts, e.g. , against the Caliphate. For this
reason, political economists use social class as a tool of historical analysis and
thereby break with the main form of modernization theory, which is elite the-
ory. Political economists find the political elite to be part of the ruling class and
see the ruling class as engaged in an ongoing conflict with the peasants, artisans
and nomads or other components of the work force. Class is defined to conform
with the social formation. In this way through a conflict model ofreality, politi-
cal economy theory is able to describe the activities of the whole society as
meaningful , and need not restrict itself to a narrative of political events and
elite biography, disembodied from the rest of society.
Social historians influenced by political economy have difficulty accepting
modernization theory because it limits history. By claiming that the locus of
history is the male political elite , modernization theory necessarily relies on an-
cillary theories about tribes, women , and others which in their characteristic
forms of organization and activity do not belong to the political elite. Moderni-
zation theorists have thus formed a tacit alliance with kinship anthropologists
and more recently with symbolic anthropologists, scholars who show how
tribes act differently, think differently, than do the elites who are actually mak-
ing history. Not all anthropologists, particularly in Europe, think this way ;
many have adopted the perspectives of political economy.
Modernization theory lacks a theory of change comparable to class struggle
in political economy . In place of a theory of change it has a theory of displace-
 Political Economy as a Paradigm for the Study o.f Islamic History 513

ment where the indigenous or "the traditional" gives way to "the modern ."
This displacement theory is based on an idea of change as the adoption of new
technology, whose self-evident superiority largely explains why modernization
theorists feel they do not have to speak of struggle, even of process. In this
theory , technology is politically neutral. When one builds a new bridge or uses
penicillin the benefits are so obvious there can be no deeply divisive social or
political consequences. The new technology is being introduced into a vacuum,
a country without penicillin or bridges. The idea of the self-evident superiority
of technology is, of course, modeled on the idea of military technology. Writers
in this mold of technocratic modernization have long written about an ··arms
balance.,. Even in the light of recent military experience like that of the United
States in Vietnam, they do not stress the role of social organization and morale;
a losing side speaks of its technical miscalculations. The idea of the social neu-
trality of technology has as a correlate the political neutrality of the techno-
crat. If modernization stands for displacement of tradition , the choice of tech-
nocrats as agents of change offers some insight into the nature of this displace-
ment. The education of a technocrat is distinguished by a concern for the use of
a particular set of techniques or machines; technocrats are not trained in philos-
ophy or larger theories of reality through which their decisions in domain A can
be evaluated for their consequences in domain B. The result is that the agent
for change can do little more than follow someone else· s instructions, or try to
replace what exists with something else; it is a form of metaphysics.
Modernization theory as a metaphysical view contains two sets of har-
monies; one is between different but noncombatant strata in a given underde-
veloped society (hence the attraction of modernization theories to stratification
or the idea of society as layers); the other is between the developed West and
the underdeveloped non-West, that is, if the non-West follows a reasonable
policy there will be no insoluble conflicts with the West. An important implicit
premise of the second goes back at least to the eighteenth-century writings of
John Locke, and it has been retained throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-
century Anglo-Saxon thought. Beginning with the earliest anticolonial struggles
like those of the United States, this assumption of harmony between developed
and underdeveloped was contested, although with the passage of time and the
growth of U.S. power, the tendency has been for American historians to adopt
the very position of the larger implicit harmonies their ancestors were at pains
to refute. Currently the most systematic body of criticism of the modernization
theory of natural harmony of regions comes from political economists. Political
economists claim that the very growth and wealth of the industrial world has
come about through its active impoverishment and despoliation of the devel-
oping world.
Who has made an analysis of the Islamic world? 2 Islamic studies has been
dominated for more than a hundred years, the entire colonial period, by orien-
talists, students of Arabic and languages of the other high court cultures which
adhered to Islam as a religion. More recently a social science of the Middle
East and South Asia has emerged which is not , linguistics aside , so preoccu-
pied with language as a key to understanding, and insofar as it uses languages
514 Peter Gran

prefers contemporary forms to medieval antecedents. These two groups , orien-

talists and social scientists, have found themselves to differ from each other
sharply, while political economists examining their collective output have
tended to stress the extent to which they were the same. Social scientists and
orientalists share a building-block approach to knowledge o r data that is gath-
ered about the elites on one hand and the masses on the other. In analyzing the
attraction to the image of a static society which Orientalist and social scientists
share, political economists developed a fun ctionalist interpretation of what sus-
tained orientalism and social science, based on the occupation of scholars and
their relationship to the peoples they studied . Although it explained many of
the motifs found in studies of various field s, for example, the sociology of Islam
and Islamic politics , this method fa iled to explain why orientalism retained its
more general prestige in Western culture among people who were not methodo-
logically given to invoking religion lightly as a blanket explanation , being secu-
larly minded and attracted to quasi-universalist philosophies. Nor did it explain
why some nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars were drawn to be orien-
talists while others were content to participate vicariously in orientalist activ-
ity. Why should Western schol ars devote their lives to studying a culture and a
religion that they often hated when university life in the West would presum-
ably offer them more agreeable activities? The attempt to understand the un-
derpinnings of orientalism in terms of specific vocations o r specific types of
outlook , for example, that of the colonial bureaucrats and their distrust of
change, the businessmen and their preference for the commercial minorities,
the missionaries and their vocation of refuting Islam , is not specific e nough and
in te rms of numbers not inclusive enough. Edward Said's Orienta/ism offers an
improved approach to understanding the same subject. It is a structuralist
model of nineteenth-century Western culture, positing a collective self and
other, superior and subordinate, built into the reality of Western identity. If the
Arab Muslims did not exist, some other part of the Colonial world would be-
come the Orient, which would then serve as a mirror image to the more explicit
self-identity of the West. Said thereby forces future analyses of orientalism to
go beyond the group who by training concentrated explicitly on an orient.
The forma l training of orientalists, whatever role it plays, distinguishes social
groups according to language patterns: because the Semites were grammati-
cally different from Aryans, they must also be culturall y and ethnically differ-
ent. Since many languages are represented in the Islamic East, which is histor-
ically a very old region , the resulting image which orientalism created and
which modernization theory has inherited was of a region where many peoples
were juxtaposed , separated discretely by language and religion. This image did
not encourage scholars to adopt concepts like class or social force s, suggesting
an internal as opposed to an external dynamic .
As seen by the orientalists conflicts in Islamic society arose between differ-
ent races and ethnicities which allegedly hated each o ther from ancient times.
On the local level, these took the form of conflict between adjacent villages and
neighborhood tribes . Orientalists believed that villages were always rivals.
Thus the colonialists who adopted what they called a checkerboard policy of
 Political Economy as a Paradiwn for the Study of Islamic History 515
playing one village off against another were following what they thought to be
Islamic precedent. But in the larger sense, these ethnic or village quarrels or
feud s were trivi a~: they led nowhere: they were cyclical. Change or hi story
s tarted at the top. that is, what the government decided or did mattered . If op-
position to governments backed by the West arose, not only colonial offical s
but many Western intellectuals were anxious to brand it as unislamic and ille-
gal : least of a ll was it seen as the logical result of a social dynamic like their
own . They preferred to picture .. Islam·· as denying the believer the right to
rebel against authority . They described Islamic society as composed of many
s ubcompartments, like quarters of a city. If trouble broke out , it could be said
to be a local problem in a given quarter. Islamic society was described as a sys-
tem of institutions like guilds and social confraternities which were largely self-
sufficient and which - and this is the main point - made few demands 011 the
government. Islamic government, on the other hand , has been pictured as very
autocratic and capricious and the people fatalisticall y accepting unreasonable
tyranny as God ' s will. T hese images s uggest to a subject people that there was
no precedent in their own past for seeking justice against authority and that the
colonial authority, whatever it s shortcomings, was much better than the Is-
lamic ones.
Part of the Orientalist theory of Islamic society is the concept of the ''normal''
social-psychological characteristics of the Mu slim , no doubt again part of the
colonial baggage. For example , writers claim what a Middle Easterner lacks in
the larger sense of village identity or national identity , he/she makes up for in
an intensely strong family solidarity and religio-ethnic solidarity . Thus, the
prospect of a group of different ethnicities aligning themselves against the colo-
nial authority would be unlikely and the idea of it "abnormal.·· Class confli cts
within ethnic groups which might disrupt the administration of clerical bureauc-
racies would be likewise abnormal. Partial exception to the theory is made for
the nationalists who are seen as a special group united by their Western educa-
t ion which gives them a new intellectual perspective. Even the nationalist,
however, unlike his Western counterpart, is a product of his intense , ethno-reli-
gious environment. In derivative works, this often means fata listic o r fanat ic,
occasionally self- indulgent, very rarely intellectual. Since Sunni Islam as a
credo contains only five basic pillars, it has been perceived by many Western
writers like H . A. R. Gibb to be "simple" and ··externalist"· . Scho lars like von
Grunebaum deduced that the mind of the Muslim is shallow, lacking the com-
plexity found in a culture that has mysteries like the Holy Trinity, and lacking
as well a conscie nce capable of internalization of moral responsibility which
comes from a Protestant Reformation , to adopt the mos t common phrase.
Other Western students of Islamic modernism imply Islam needs a Martin
Luther to get beyond the blind belief that God controls man ·s every thought
and act. And this assumption blends smoothly with the larger theory of society
perceived as elite-mass dichotomy. The modernizing clerical elite tries to
promulgate reforms which the masses are supposed to obey. But the masses
clearl y do not obey. So the elite-mass theorists pragmatically s tress the great
gap between the Muslim clerical elite and the ignorant masses which follow
516 Peter Gran
saints, who in tum pander to their s uperstitions. When these saints backed by
the masses intrude into national politics , it is regarded as a time of disorder:
According to this theory, such disorders owe not to fundamental ideas of jus-
tice but rather to the unpredictable and dangerous occurrence of a charis matic
personality . No one can resist following charis matic figures, not so much be-
cause of their ideas or organizations but because of their personal charm. While
t hese ideas are all consistent with one another, when one comes to the charis-
matic deus ex machina, one can see on purely logical grounds the weakness of
the whole chain of reasoning. For example, confronted with the need to explain
long-term opposition movements to authority like the Isma·m movement ,
Western writers accepted the view of the clerical spokesmen of the landlord
regimes. Such movements were the machinations of heretics , of charismatic
figures. They were outside society, that is, the elite-mass dichotomy. In s um ,
orientalism obstructs historical study by explaining away change rather than
explaining change .
Islamic and Mediterranean societies use more religious language and dis-
course than do the societies of the industrial world . Confronted with the need
to explain this fact, scholars came up with the theory of different mentalities,
oriental and occidental. T heir evidence was everyday speech of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, and the masses of pietistic writings in common circula-
tion. But does the use of religious language prove that people are more .. reli-
gious·· o r rather that rel igion was merely a more important vehicle of com-
munication than it was or is in the bourgeois societies? T his question can be
answered not in terms of language but in terms of the interaction of language and
its social content. One must consider the s tructure of the ruling culture and how
the lower classes can func tion within it. In the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies, the importance of the clerical bureaucracy as an instrument of rule , that
is, as a basis for legitimizing regime in many developing countries rose. As
ruling classes in the Islamic world grew more dependent on the West, they grew
more vulnerable internally and relied heavily on their own c lerics. Religious
bureaucracies actually grew in size .
Religious discourse , in fact, was politics disguised , consciously or uncon-
sciously. When one tries to separate the religious content from the secular con-
tent of a book in theology or in a youth movement called Islamic, the difficu l-
ties arise. A study of the life of the Companions of the Prophet may turn out to
be a critique of the morality of the present-day rulers. In a book the absence or
presence of women as ruwa · (sources about the Prophet Mul)ammad) may
point to the writer' s involvement in one side or another of the present-day
women ' s issue. The decision to reprint the life of Mul)ammad by Rifa·ah
al-Tahtawi, a nineteenth-century shaykh , in 1976, reflected not only the piety of
the. editor but also the assertion of a kind of rationalis t o utlook appeal ing to the
bourgeois. 3 A popular image of Mul)ammad, on the other hand, would s how
him to be superhuman , to have qua lities which the majority feel the need for in
their s truggle for j ustice. Even the general student of the Middle East not in-
terested in so-called questions of religion or language would have heard that the
Muslim Brotherhood has a left, an Islamic Marxist outlook, or that Islam would
 Political Economy as a Paradigm for the Study of Islamic History 517
not necessarily be a bulwark against communism in the Middle East. The basis
for the idea of the " religious" nature of the Muslim has been an overly literalist
approach , a positivist approach, to understanding writings of the clerical elite
and expressions in the colloquial, coupled perhaps with an underevaluation of
metaphor or innuendo , an exaggerating of the representational aspect of lan-
guage. Difference in class structure and not mentality is the principal explana-
tion for the presence of religious language. In the regimes on the periphery of
the world market, a weak ruling class confronts the problems of rule. Suasion
as opposed to outright force is necessary; the language of religion is the only
way the affluent bourgeois-cultured rulers can try to communicate across class
lines. The Qudin is therefore played all day on the radio and television and is
discussed by shaykhs as a way of conveying proper norms for the society to
follow.
Geography has contributed importantly to the theory of Mediterranean-
Middle Eastern personality. These societies are said to be constrained by cli-
matic and geographical factors which affect the mentality of the people of the
region and which can be modified through contact with the modernizing West.
It is true that only parts of the Mediterranean are habitable and that a certain
relation to nature is possible because of the size of the deserts, lack of water, or
lack of arable land on both sides of the sea, but the fixity and rootedness of
patterns of life, (e.g., supposed transhumancy of nomads, and other unchang-
ing phenomenon) are taken as proof of fundamental differences between North-
ern Europe, a domain of history and change, and Southern Europe, area of
stasis and constraint. The idea of constraints, or the role of the physical en-
vironment as a constraint, has never attracted American scholars, some say be-
cause of our pragmatist roots, but it is important to note that we increasingly
rely on the French for the direction to take in history , and that many French
writers are using a theory which implies that the industrial North of France is
modem, active, and able to deal with the constraints it may face, whereas for
the South and the Southern sphere, the constraints would be determinative
were it not for contact with the North. To choose the extreme example, the
laconic, phlegmatic personality of the Mediterranean is attributed to the lack of
sharp seasonal breaks. Much more plausible would be to explain such behavior
as the result of unequal political and economic relations with industrial Europe .
More recently, social-psychological, linguistic, and geographical theories
have been joined by a theory of oriental child development. The swaddling of
Middle Eastern children , sexism in child-rearing practices, and a range of other
practices have been examined to illuminate how this region differs from the
West. The underlying assumption is that Eastern child-rearing explains why
high level sexual jealousy exists, why fam il y patterns are more cohesive in the
Middle East than in the industrial world. Shame is used in child rearing and not
guilt as with us, Western anthropologists claim ; again it is the United States
model versus theirs without reference to social class or role of individualism .
Psychological influences when reinforced by social force s sustain a high level
of concern in the family . But, people in the East are not frozen by the experi-
ences of their own childhood any more than they are in the West. For better or
518 Peter Gran

worse, there is a congruence between child rearing and the existing structure of
society . Property owning classes tend to use guilt, others shame more . After
all, the meaning of individual development and fulfillment depends on the na-
ture of the society; it is inappropriate to apply the psychology of a bourgeois
society judgmentally to one that is not.
In s um , a range of ideas and assumptions in several different field s intercon-
nect to form a theory loosely known as modernization theory of which orien-
talism is an important part . This theory failed until now to uncover important
dynamics or to explain change. It has added defects of not being able to discuss
women , peasants or tribes except as objects. It has certain clear political over-
tones as well , for if to be modern is to follow the path of the West and to imitate
it , then the West will be your natural ally.
Political economy is the most hopeful alternative to the dominant but prob-
lem-ridden modernization theory and the older oriental ism for the study of the
various societies that follow Islam. Political economy is a materialistic theory
of reality ; it claims that social and economic force s determine the direction of
history , determine to a large extent the lives of individuals and the characteris-
tic culture of different historical eras. Political economy is a holistic theory ,
that is, it seeks to explain, or suggest how to explain, all historical phenomena .
Areas that cannot be explained are much more than lacunae, they represent
serious problems for the theory . Political economy has gone through many
forms in the last hundred years but in the form meant here it is dialectical , not
positivist. The idea of the dialectic is a fundamental scientific principle in all
metaphysical thought. Where a positivist scientist seeks theorems or laws on
the analogy of Newton ·s laws of gravity and regards the growth of science as
the growth of a body of laws, an alternative tradition of scientific inquiry , dia-
lectical materialism argues that no law is very valuable in pure laboratory con-
ditions, that the purpose of science is to explain the real world as it is changing
and how it is changing. To study physics without engineering, chemistry with-
out medicine , is to simply congregate facts, or regularities or laws, without ever
being able to progress toward an understanding of the world outside the labora-
tory. It is noteworthy that while thousands of people study the history of the
United States, very few people try to situate their details in a theory of how this
society as a whole is moving. The principles of the dialectic offer a way to study
the totality and how it is moving. In fact, according to dialectics, what is real is
this change or movement. To be a historian is to be able to explain social
change. One does this by identifying the basic contradictions in a society and
the way they are working themselves out. Karl Marx, who contributed to politi-
cal economy in the nineteenth century, identified the principal contradictions in
capitalist society as those between labor and capital. The interests of labor and
capital were in a fundamental sense irreconcilable , labor wanting more money
for less work and capital wanting more work for less money. Marx recognized ,
although he did not spell out, secondary contradictions which made workers
identify with their bosses in wars and in colonial adventures. Marx also contrib-
uted importantly to the study of the history of modern capitalism dating it from
the sixteenth century in England , which thus gives us our date for the beginning
of modern history and the modern world market.
 Political Economy as a Paradigm for the Study of Islamic History 519

Marx and the classical Marxia n tradition were less successful in the study of
the Is lamic world and the developing countries generally than they were in that
of the industrial countries of the West. 4 There are two main traditional lines of
interpretation of the non-West which are both, in fact, orientalist. The first is
the image of the East as an area of oriental despotism, inspired by Marx's the-
ory of the Asiatic Mode of Production ; the second is the image of the East as
feudal or precapitalist, subsequently capitalist. This second theory has a lot in
common with the modernization theory as it poses the East as following the
lead of the West. The theory of oriental despotism claims, on very limited evi-
dence, that there was little or no private property outside of Western Europe,
especially in la nd , before the coming of Europe to the non-West. Land was be-
lieved to be owned by rulers and rulers were believed to be entrusted with it by
God. The lack of a gentry or land-owning class in this theory was a way of ex-
plaining why the absolute monarchs of the East, like the Ottomans, were not
challenged as in England by the rise of a parliament. In oriental despotism the
organization of society demanded very little interaction between the govern-
ment and the rest of the society . People lived in self-sufficient villages a nd paid
taxes a nd served the government in return for the technical assistance of the
government in irriga tion and other large-scale infrastructural investments be-
yond the reach of villagers. It should be noted that this model not only lacks a
dialectic or an internal sense of process (which would be inconsistent) but it is a
convenient theory in a colonial age for a European power to come and capture
a government. 5 If this theory was to guide practice, the colonial power would
become owner of all the land, and the captured society would have no tradition
of protest or of making significant demands on the government.
In studies of feudalism in the Is lamic world, the emphasis is on the heavy
oppression of the people; there is no model of s truggle (a dialectic) in which the
feudal class is pictured in struggle. For this reason, it is easy for Marxist writers
to accept the view of modernization theory that the coming of Napoleon , or
the coming of the West generally, helped to bring about capitalism. The fail-
ure to find an internal dynamic in the feudalism model is a serious problem. It is
notable that most Marxist writers believe that the struggle of the Western work-
ing classes is more dynamic and important than tha t of the East. This shows
again the compatibility of orientalism a nd Marxism.
Modern political economy attempts to fulfill the traditional ma nda te of his-
tory to study change over time through the depiction of the past as composed of
a number of social formations. Each social formation is studied in terms of its
fundamental social conflicts, conflicts that are so profound as to eventually tear
the society apart. In the political economy tradition historical process is studied
by tracing the development of these conflicts or contradictions as they work
themselves toward some fundamental social realignme nt. Political economy
can, of course, deal with relative social stasis or comparatively cyclical trends
in social reproduction as sometimes found among nomads, but in heeding the
mandate to s tudy change, political economy tends to look at aspects where
conflict is important. The development or progress of political economy as a
science of man is evaluated quite differently from that of the conventional disci-
pline of his tory. Progress involves the ability to situate a n ever expanding body
520 Peter Gran
of diverse knowledge into its social formation paradigms. In situating knowl-
edge political economists employ a contextualist model of seeking truth , the
opposite of the positivist one which progresses through a capacity to isolate
and s ubdivide. Political economy stresses the social determination of individual
behavior. In political economy great men do not make his tory and inte llectuals
do not float free possessing something called consciousness. Everything is an-
chored in a specific social context.
Political economy owes its concern with materialis m to classical Marxism
but it winds up in most instances as a quite severe critic of the better-known
Communist and socialist parties and movements past and present. Political
economy's analysis of capitalism makes use of concepts such as the world mar-
ket , trade, core and periphery capitalism. These concepts tend to shift the
focus of analysis from the dominant Marxist concerns, the nation , and the
mode of production of the nation. Within political economy there are at least
two forms of world market theory. ( 1) The older and bette r known one called
the dependency school is associated with the writings of Andre Gundar Frank
and a number of other Latin Americans; it emphasizes the development of the
modern world , postulating a connection between the growing wealth of the in-
dus trial West and the growing impoveris hment of the raw-goods-producing pe-
riphery of the world market. (2) The writings of Samir Amin exemplify a newer
trend within political economy that became very influential all over the world in
the 1970s. Amin's principal contribution is his attempt to break with the re-
ceived Western-centered view of history which has dominated all discourse for
a long time. In Amin· s use of core (the industrial part) and periphery (the raw-
goods-producing areas) the idea of dominance and subordination is not repro-
duced so much as the interdependence of elements simultaneously caught in
their own local dynamics. These ideas are spelled out in his Accumulation on a
World Scale and Unequal Development. 6 Where Frank had had the insight to
discern that Latin America was part of the world market from the sixteenth
century and therefore could be considered not feudal but somehow a part of
modern world capitalist economy, Amin proceeded to show on the basis of
much wider selection of evidence that regions like Latin America were not sim-
ply a dependent part of the larger world market but were a part of periphery
capitalism which had its own general character, its predictable phases, in other
words , a history, heretofore undetected .
The firs t comprehensive attempt to apply political economy to the study of
Arab and Middle Eastern history is to be found in the writings of Samir Amin.
Maxime Rodinson , who preceded him , made a number of very important the-
matic s tudies on Islamic ideology and capitalism , and on the life of the Prophet
Muhammad . Amin took up the more general problem of the his torical model
used to study the Islamic Middle East, the communal-feudal-capitalist evolu-
tionary model. This traditional model took for granted that the basis of Middle
Eastern economy was agriculture . More recent scholarship has cast very seri-
ous doubt on this. Relying primarily on newer writers like Maurice Lombard,
Amin stresses and in some cases exaggerates the commercial and indus trial
basis of medieval Arab economy and culture. Amin does not employ the feudal
 Political Economy as a Paradigm for the Study of Islamic History 521
concept, choosing instead that of the tributary mode , a category that stresses
the extraction of tribute by rulers equally from land or commerce.
In Amin's writings feudalism becomes a special case of the tributary mode,
in which the extraction process requires a lord on a manor in proximity to the
direct producers. For him the tributary mode is the overall description of Arab
history which is rooted mainly in commerce except in Egypt, the one natural
agricultural region. For the period after the tributary form, that is for the nine-
teenth-century colonial age, Amin sees the formation of periphery capitalist
states in which the important commercial structure, which always underlay
Arab culture, was destroyed , and was replaced by one of export-oriented agri-
culture. The contemporary post-colonial period represents yet another phase in
which the Arab nation is redeveloping its industrial and commercial economy
and, on a cultural level, moving back closer to what it had been during the trib-
utary phase. Samir Amin has been justifiably criticized for an unnecessary in-
jection of nationalism into his analysis, but one must admit that it does lead to
new hypotheses. For example in Arab Nation and elsewhere, he argues that the
reason capitalism arose first in Europe and not in the Arab world , despite the
latter's relative advance, was in part the c ruelty and inefficiency of the extrac-
tive process in the European feudal version of the tributary mode of produc-
tion. European feudalism had the effect of uprooting labor on an unprecedented
scale , throwing large numbers of proletarians into the hands of European mer-
chants, thereby giving them a critical competitive advantage to move into in-
dustry and to experiment with new technology without social resistance.
The weakest part of Amin's analysis is his treatment of the sixteenth to the
nineteenth century. Arab history in this period is posed as separate from Eu-
rope. Despite various rivalries the Islamic world and Europe were interpene-
trating in important ways, so to speak of self-sufficiency of the Arab world at
this period sounds more like a defensive reflex against the decline theory than
anything else. Furthermore, his assumption that Egypt is to be equated with
agriculture, and hence only marginally Arab, ignores the findings of a number
of recent scholars. Thus while Amin 's approach represents a great advance
over the model of the Golden Age and its decline, there remains work to do to
tie more precisely the history of the Islamic Middle East to a paradigm which is
not so discontinuous. Amin's depiction of the tributary mode is, to say the
least, incomplete because it stresses trade over production. Production is the
normal locus of the conflicts from which political economists work. In Amin it
is difficu lt to identify the critical social conflicts and to determine how the tribu-
tary social formation progresses. Where are t he ruptures , transitions, and
crises? The pretributary phase also is a problem ; the growth of Islam from its
incipient and marginal phases needs to be explained by some as yet undefined
larger dynamics.
How can one save the important insights of Sam ir Amin's model and still tie
the problematic of Islamic history more closely to the issue of production and
social conflicts surrounding production? One model has been sketched here,
along with some criticisms which could be leveled against it. Others are clearly
needed before this one is fully explored, so complex is the subject. The model
522 Pe ter Gran
presented here in a few pages a pplies to the s pread of Islam in the core lands
only. Five periods, each with a characteris tic socia l formation predominating,
suggest themselves as bases fo r discrete analysis: ( 1) from Jahiliyya (date un-
specified) to A.O. 660, formation of nomadic dominance; (2) A.O. 660-950, era
of agrarian tributary states (here in opposit ion to Amin); (3) A.O. 950- 1550, era
of commercial tributary states (closer to Amin): (4) 1550-1850, periphery em-
pire fo rmation; (5) 1850 to the present. periphery capitalism . These categories
convey in brief compass a set o f broader hypotheses and questions about the
meaning of the history of the Is lamic era. If we already know from o rientalist
research that Islamic history was marked by great dynas tic turnover and fairly
limited institutionalization , are we not on the threshold of finding that the
masses of peasants, nomads, and artisans played a central role in achieving
this? For example, in the fi rst period, the paradigm points toward the need to
know what crises there were in nomadism for Mul:iammad and the Rashidun
Caliphs to appear in them as great figure s. How and why does an agrarian for-
mation gain its dominance after A.O. 660? In this second period the conflict
seems to be one of peasant direct producers and slave miners agains t the state .
T his primary struggle worked itself out destroying the formati vii anu ushering
in the third period commonly known as the imarate phase but for which the
concept of commercial tributary state sounds more precise. For each period
there are dominant cultural questions over which the contending social force s
somehow collide. These reall y cannot be explored without social analysis: at
the same time they cannot be collapsed into the social analysis. For the first
period. the triumph of monothe is m over the polytheistic form s of nomadic reli-
gion and competing forms of monotheism is a major event , by no means a fore-
gone conclusion in political economy. The second period has been traditionally
preempted by cultural scholars interested in the revival of Aristotel ian learning
and then its abrupt end . Fro m this concern the traditional theories have been
spun by von Grunebaum and others about the conservative antirational charac-
ter of religion in general and Islam in particular. From this s upposedly reli-
giously based suppression of science comes the idea of decline which j ustifies
the quick s hift of scholarly attention to a focus on the transfer of Greek knowl-
edge to Europe. Political economists studying a somewhat similar case. t he rise
of Aristotelian thought, reached conclusions which could serve as a hypothesis
here . Master-slave relations in ancient Greece served as the social background
for Aristotle·s intellectual polarities. T he movement of translation from Greek
took place in a phase when landlord and peasant were confronting each other in
a polar relations hip for the first and only time in Islamic his tory, that is to say in
a manner remin iscent of ancient Greece itself. T he logic of the social context.
that is, of life as lived from the point of view of the state in this atypical period
of limited commerce and industry was one in which polar opposition domi-
nated . This was the period in which the translation movement took place: this
was the one period in which this type of logic could underlie ruling thought un-
challenged. With the relative collapse of this social formation. as a result of the
various struggles of the peasan ts and slaves. the social relationships ceased to
exist and the Aristotelian heritage was subsumed under theology. T he mer-
 Political Economy as a Paradigm for the Study of Islamic History 523
chants and artisans who did exist a lso contributed, although in an unnoticed
way, to the large r struggles.9 The movement rooted in the merchant and indus-
trial sectors, including not only Baghdad but Basra and other lesser ports of the
Gulf, was known as the Isma'ili movement. Isma'ilism was, of course, perse-
cuted when the land system was strong. Unfortunately the Isma'Hi response, a
cultural and religious one, has not been well studied. 10 l sma'llism has been ap-
proached by scho lars as a heterodox religious movem ~n t more than as a social
movement.
A third formation came into being from 950 to 1550. It has often been defined
as fe udal , military, or slave when seen in terms of specific elite occupations.
When it is seen in terms of production and the extraction of surplus, it becomes
commercial and industrial. Agriculture played a role b11t often a quite reduced
one a nd not only in Iraq . The ruling class turned to bureaucratic means to control
and incorporate trade and production as they had tried previously to do with
agriculture . Some of the well-known techniques ruler.; used to control urban
work forces were to develop guilds and futuwwa and enla rged cultural appa-
ratus for the propagation of orthodox thought: the niadrasa system. At the
same time the crisis of an artisanal counterculture was partly overcome by the
integration of Sufism into orthodoxy on a certain basis by the theologian al-
Ghazzali. In addition a more secure approach to maintaining a high level of arts
and sciences was developed which did not compromise the cultural program
but which reta ined a disciplined work force. This was achieved by giving the
minority communities extensive state patronage to carry on in medicine, sci-
ence, and philosophy in the faylasuf tradition, whereas Mus lims were not simi-
larly encouraged, except where Shn scientists were included. Rulers could
thus enjoy the fruits of science s ince it came from pariah communities and
posed no threat to the regime. The main line of Muslim state culture in this
epoch was Avicennism, an effort to synthes ize previous knowledge into a
metaphysical tradition. On the popular level working class culture took the
form of Sufism in the cities and nomadic tribal culture across the great trade
routes.
The institutions a nd cultural forms of t his period must be taken very
serious ly as scholars like Marsha ll Hodgson, Hossein Nasr, and others have
shown , for this type of formation lasted for six hundred years. During the s ix
hundred years a major struggle took place, which no doubt affected the history
of the outer world, but which did not bring the formation to a c lose: the urban
labor struggle . At the beginning of the period the industries of the Levant and
Cairo dominated the Mediterranean commodity market but by the fourteenth
century this was no longer the case. Amin· s theory of the new source of cheap
European labor certainly provides one kind of explanation. No doubt the many
strikes, s lowdowns, and other disruptions on the Arab side also contributed to
the breakdown of the commodity marked a nd thus help to explain the great
s hift of commodity production to Europe in this period. The coming of the Ot-
tomans to the Arab world in the second decade of the s ixteenth century marks a
relative s hift toward landlordism and away from the commercial tributary for-
mation. Orientalism was thus correct in pointing to this as a watershed but
524 Peter Gran
wrong to impute racial or ethnic reasons as the crucial ones. Also it is hasty to
see the date of military conquest as decisive for the life of the formation . Samir
Amin may exaggerate in claiming that the tributary mode ran through the eigh-
teenth century over all , but for certain centers he would be right , for example,
Damascus. It is easier to take 1550 to show the decline of the Muslim mer-
chants in Istanbul and the rise of the new alliance between Muslim landlords
and Western producers linked by the commercial minorities.
In the fourth period , a latifundist agricultural class ruled the periphery em-
pires for three hundred years. T he rise of this new class was partl y a conse-
quence of the price revolution of 1550. The Price Revolution , which came
about because of the flood of New World gold and silver into Europe, enabled
European industrialists to offer the highest prices for raw wool and other raw
products, thereby inducing the Ottoman landlords to sell it to them rather than
to the loca l artisans. It spelled the ruin of industry in the Islamic world which
soon had to compete with the influx of European-produced goods in the local
market. 11 Landlords became sorely tempted to raise production. They at-
tempted to turn the huge Ottoman Empire into an export-oriented agriculture
region. This was simply not possible, however, without modern means of coer-
cion which were then nonexistent. As the Ottomans and other periphery land-
lords applied pressure to their countrysides to grow more, a series of major re-
volts ensued beginning in the late sixteenth century and lasting well into the
seventeenth . These engulfed most of the regions of the Ottoman Empire and
many other countries beyond . The net effect was that while the Empire contin-
ued , theoretically, to exist, effective rule became spread through a number of
power centers, approximating the size of the nation states which were to come
into being in the nineteenth century. After the revolts the landlords in these
regional centers tried to deal directly with Europe to avoid Ottoman taxes.
They disguised their actions from Istanbul ; Istanbul, of course, declared suspi-
cious trade to be illegal.
Islamic-Mediterranean trade grew ever more concentrated on France. For
France the Mediterranean region had become increasingly important by the
eighteenth century, as France lost her New World colonies to England. France
found the Ottoman Empire to be a market for her silk and fabrics and to be a
source of food for Marseilles. These ongoing economic relations underlay the
various Frenc h schemes to invade Arab regions entertained by the Bourbon
monarchy and finally executed by Napoleon. The Napoleonic invasion of
Egypt was not the beginning of a new era but the continuation of the same
one. 12 The overall onslaught against indigenous industry of France and Britain
in the nineteenth century served to st rengthen landlords, weaken Arab mer-
chants , a nd to make the state increasingly secure against the nomads. These
changes led to the wholesale turning of the economy to wage labor capitalism
and agricultural export.
Modernization theory, be it orientalist or Marxist, gives relevant information
about the transition from the fourth to the fifth phase, that is, the rise of periph-
ery capitalism. But it places too much explanatory emphasis on the acts of a
 Political Economy as a Paradigm for the Study of Islamic History 525
few Europeans and reformers, failing to see the larger internal dynamic. A
great conflict , invisible in modernization theory, was resolved in favor of a
male, waged-labor economy to the detriment of women who were not waged,
of nomads who were forcibly sedentarized, and of peasants who lost the advan-
tages of the older, local, self-sufficiency. Large-scale conflicts, sometimes pit-
ting governments against the peasants and nomads in military showdowns,
took place before 1850. Economic coercion and inte lSe cultural propaganda
were also used , so that to reduce the drama of that history to elite biography,
and to attribute change to the West when so much involved local events seems
a gross oversimplification. Where modernization theory speaks of the coming
of the West , political economy theory chooses to speak of the transformation of
parts of the West, especially business, bringing on finance capitalism, the phase
which saw the cycling of Western wealth into periphery investment. In periph-
ery capitalism, the fifth phase, the investment of " Western"' funds helped capi-
talism finally to emerge in the village as a clear force. In the village capitalist
peasants or kulaks become the crucial component of tlie new periphery capi-
talism. The ruling landlord classes found European support as well through the
colonial age . Since then they have gone it a lone , either with the landlords ruling
(the liberal regimes) or in conjunction with the urban lower middle c lass in
cross-class alliances (the state capitalist variants).
Culture in the fourth and fifth phases among ruling circles shows a steady
development toward positivism. ln the periphery empire phase, positivism was
largely mixed with a fragmented form of Avicennism. The oppositional cul-
ture was entirely based in holistic philosophies of which a more radical A vicen-
nism was often part. In the cities, there was radical Sufism like the Bekta-
shiya and the Bayyiimiya, and in the countryside, Maraboutism and saint wor-
ship. In the periphery capitalist phase, positivism emerged more and more
clearly in ruling class culture and the oppositional movements continued to be
holistic . In urban areas, the communists and the Muslim Brethren became im-
portant.

Conclusion
The emergence of a political economy interpretation of Middle Eastern his-
tory by Samir Amin and a number of less well-known authors writing mainly in
Arabic has barely been noticed in the West, but in the Islamic world there is
already a lively debate. ln this debate the landlord classes and their intellec-
tuals are coming to the defense of modernization theory, trying to downplay
some of the more extreme positions of orientalism. Much of the oppositional
culture is sympathetic to or actively producing political economy. European
and American intellectual circles are also divided. The debates should be inter-
esting.

TEMPLE UNIVERSITY
PHILADELPH IA, PA.
526 Peter Gran

NOTES
Author"s note: I would like to thank Rifaat Abou el-Haj for his critical reading of this iext, and
Teresa Joseph. and Daniel Goodwin.
1 Lee W. Gibbs and W. Taylor Stevenson, Myth and the Crisis of Historical Consciousness (Mis-

soul a, Mont. : American Academy of Religion, 1975): Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays
in Cul111rol Criticism (Ballimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1978): see Abdallah Laroui's
The Crisis of the Arab lnte//ecrulll (Berkele y: University of California Press, 1974) pp. 24 ff., chap.
4, for a critique of the Palestinian hi storian Qus1an1in Zurayk. and linearism.
2
Edward Said. Orienta/ism (New York: Pantheon. 1978): Bryan Turner, Marx and the End of
Orienta/ism (London, 1978).
3 Rifii'ah al-Tah\iiwi. Muhammad: Niluiyat al-ijazft sirat stikin al-Jfijaz ed. Fiiniq Abii Zayd (3

vols.: Cairo, 1967).

•This applies to quite recent work s in neo-Marxism as well. Perry Anderson (lineages of the
Absolurist State [London: NLB, 1974), pp. 360-96, 462-549). while dismissing the Asiatic Mode of
Production as theory. and calling for further research. presents the "house of Islam .. in largely
idealist categories . The Ottoman dynamic was a combination of"ghazi s pirit and old Islamic princi-
ples" (p. 363): Ottoman imperial expansion was a product of a military ideology and not economic
forces (cf. comments in the text on Duby·s theory). By missing the commercial and industrial basis,
Anderson find s a "permanent gulf between juridical theory and legal practice in classical
islam . . . ·· (p. 498). Anderson here is quoting Schacht. Like Schacht he brings out a landlord
view of the peasant, the mysteries of the Islamic cit y (a city that lacks municipal au1onomy) and
other artifices which one would not expect in a Marxist book on any other subject. Turke y is
viewed as being characterized by military rigidity, ideological zealotry, and commercial lethargy"
(p. 517), also India and Persia. In sum. this is a work in Marxist orientalism, most of it is devoted to
the rise of the West.
$The analysis of Ms. Cynthia Flannery. UCLA.
6 Samir Amin: Unequal De1·e/opme11t (New York: Monthly Review , 1976): Accumulwion on a

World Scale (New York: Monthly Review , 1974): Arab Nation (New York: Monthly Review ,
1978).
1 This schema was applied previously on a very limited scale to the subject of Islamic medicine,

"Overview of Arab Medical Systems:· Social Science and Medicine 13B (1980). 339-349.
" The idea of a nomad-centered hi story of· Abd al-' Aziz al -Diiri appears to have influenced a
recen1 work, Naji l:lasan, The Role of the Arab Tribes in the East during the Period of the Um-
mayads. 40-132 A. H. (Baghdad: Baghdad University. 1978).
9 • ArifTamir, Al-Qar<imi[a. asl11h11111, nasha 't11h11111, wa tiirikhuhum (Beirut, 1972): Sali~ b. ·Ali,

Al-Tt111z.i111tit al-ijtinui'iya wa-1-iqti,widiya fi-1-Bafra (Baghdad. 1953): T . Lewicki, " lbadiya" in B.

Lewis e1 al. (eds.) Encyclopedia of Is lam (Leiden: Brill. 1970), Ill. 648-66o.
10 Tib Tizini. Mllslmi'al-ru 'ya al-jadido i/ii-1-jikra al-· arabiya fi-l-"<1.)·r al-wasit (Damascus, 1971):

l:l usayn Muniwwah. Al-Nll<.ci'tit lll-maddiyll fi-1-flllsafa al-'arabiya al-islamiya (2 vols.: Beirut .
1979).
"Huri lslamoglu , "Ottoman Agenda," Re view v. 1 (1977).
12
lsla111ic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt 176o-t840 (Austin: University of Texas Press. 1979),
chap. 1.